Thoughts on Law School Confidential/Ramblings on My Future
I started the book yesterday. I am only about 100 pages in. So far, it hasn't really taught me anything. It has depressed me though.I have always wanted to be a lawyer. In second grade, we had one of those career days, where you have to dress up as your chosen profession. My mom asked me what I wanted to be, and I said, "A lawyer." I don't think I really knew what a lawyer did. There were no attorneys in my family. But, I thought that attorneys helped people.
So, I decided that I wanted to become an attorney to help people. It seems like an easy enough premise. I didn't decide to go to law school for the money and have never had a desire to work for a big corporation in my life. If I wanted to work for a corporation, I would have done marketing or business. I want to become a lawyer to actually practice law.
As time went on, my interests have become more diverse. I would love to focus on human rights, environmental issues, housing discrimination or something along the lines of a public defender. Basically, I don't know what I want to do, but I know that I am likely to be at the bottom end of the pay scale for lawyers.
Now here is where I might have messed up (or at least the book makes it seem as though I did.) I was offered a pretty much full-ride to a lower ranked, regional school. I was also accepted to a highly ranked (extremely expensive) school with minimal financial aid. After visiting both schools, I decided that I really liked the expensive school and felt that the quality of education was better. So, I said bye-bye to the ginormous scholarship and hello to years of debt. (think 20k of debt compared to 100k of debt.)
Does this make me an idiot? I don't know. The book certainly says that it does. Knowing that I am not going to be making a ton of money anytime soon, they say that I should have gone to the less expensive school. However, what about quality of education and happiness. If i am going to go into debt for something, should I get the most that I can out of it? Everyone says that law school is so miserable, so shouldn't I do what I can to make the experience easier on myself?
On the other hand, I don't want to end up like on of the attorneys in the book. She says that she had always wanted to work in the prosecutor's office, but after graduation, she just couldn't afford to take a position there due to her debt. Instead, she wound up doing corporate law at a big firm. I don't know, a certain part of me would like to think that I'm not like that. If put in the same position, I would do what I wanted and just live with the debt, paying it off as fast as I could. Realistically though, I know that I hate not being financially stable.
Sigh, maybe I will just find a sugar daddy who want to fund my legal education. Or better yet, a rich long lost relative. Then again, a scholarship would also work.
1 Comments:
I've always wanted to work in public interest. I went to the best-ranked school that I was accepted to. I'm $130k in debt and I have NO idea how I'm gonna pay that off without being miserable for a long time. I wish someone would've explained that magnitude of debt to me *before* law school.
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